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Extremely Bland: How Outdoor Mags Ruined Outdoor Writing

July’s Outside magazine featured a story of survival. That was it: a guy trying to survive. Thayer Walker, the author, dropped himself off on an uninhabited Panamanian island and allowed himself to starve for three weeks. At the end, he picked up the phone, called a nearby resort, and a boat came to pick him up.

In the meantime, he ate termites, limpets, coconuts, and some sugarcane that someone had planted and then abandoned. He snorkeled around the island’s reefs for an hour or so a day. He tried to weave baskets. He failed to make a fire.

In the end, he learned that he really didn’t like pina coladas much anymore. Too coconutty.

While I admire Walker’s ability to gut it out for so long, I don’t understand why he did it or why Outside decided to tell us about it. We used to read about life-or-death struggles endured on quests with at least partially noble motives. Into Thin Air, about the 1995 Everest disaster, springs to mind. Or a better example, Farley Mowatt’s Canadian summers watching wolves and getting by on voles.

But those kinds of stories upped the ante, and now poor travel writers have to think of ever-more obscure ways of nearly dying in order to catch our attention. Last year, a BASE jumper had to jump from a bridge into a canyon continuously for 24 hours, puffing back up the hill every time, to get our attention.

Told well, and when real drama is involved, it’s gripping. But has anyone noticed that the person is occupying more and more of the frame these days? The outdoors is getting squeezed into smaller and smaller nooks – and I don’t know about you, but the outdoors is why I go out into the outdoors.

Walker went to a 5-day survival school before his trip. He was bent on learning to make fire with a bow and stick, and succeeded once or twice, although his teacher’s words were prophetic: “Fire is always most difficult when it’s most important.” But did he do any other preparation? Did he learn what the common plants and animals were likely to be? Which plants might be edible? What might be fruiting? Whether to eat termite larvae or termite adults?

There’s almost no jungle in Walker’s story beyond the word “jungle.” Didn’t he see anything interesting while he was looking for food or tinder? No snakes, no cool bugs, weird flowers? At least on the first well-fed days, didn’t he marvel at anything around him? There’s none of this kind of detail – just steely lines about eating limpets and throwing up.

Maybe this isn’t Walker’s fault – maybe he discarded page after soulful page because his editors wanted this instead. But for us it amounts to the same thing: an article about a person. Somewhere. Trying to nearly die.

Outdoor magazines seem to have decided that the 20-something upwardly mobile male is the only person worth publishing for. They’re turning into Maxim, just with more granite: hence recent Outside articles on a Playboy bunny at Everest base camp and “How to Shag on a Portaledge” (Cheesy first line: “So you’ve just climbed a 5.12 with a 10.0 and you’re all sweaty and hot”).

A recent National Geographic Adventure ran a story on road-tripping through Baja California. The captions – which outweighed the rest of the text – told us what each person was wearing and how much it cost. At this point, the Patagonia catalog is doing a better job of being an outdoor magazine.

Back in the day, Tim Cahill did some actual research for his Outside stories. He looked up historical accounts of anacondas and their fearsome size before going out to look for them. And then when he did rustle one up, he admitted it was a lot smaller than it was cracked up to be. David Quammen used to fill us in on actual things happening outdoors, like asteroidal craters in Kamchatka and illegal immigrants jumping desiccated border fences and why we ought to revere the mosquito. Sound interesting? It is.

I don’t mean to pick on Walker and his plucky, if pointless, quest to survive. But survival has become just another additive, like high fructose corn syrup or guarana extract, that we get in everything now whether we want it or not.

We’ve got YouTube for when we want to see someone point a videocamera at his face right before doing something foolish. So could the outdoor magazines please pan back around to our surroundings now? It’s pretty out there.

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12 Responses

Another brilliant piece, Mr. Powell. If the outdoor rags, at least the American ones, were re-doing the Scott South Pole story, they’d have him drug there and back by Amundsen while focusing on how the Playstation 3 games sputtered in the cold. Chuck the Bunny-on-Everest stuff; I preferred Robyn Davidson’s account of traversing the Outback via camel.

It is interesting to refllect on the origin of the outdoor magazines. On the basis of nothing more than a steadily failing memory, I would put it down to Sports Illustrated, which ran a couple of articles a year back in the 70s about various outdoor adventures. Those pieces were written by George Plimpton and Peter Matthiesson and others of that ilk. Unfortunately, the supply of writers of that quality has not kept pace with demand (present company excepted, Scribbler). Combined with today’s taste for sensationalism we get a kind of Gresham’s law where bad writing drives out good. It’s “Survivor” in print.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Fielding – nice example with Scott/Amundsen/PlayStation. Everyone has their favorite adventure epic, and I had to keep myself from mentioning Scott or Shackleton in my post – so I’m glad you did. Anyone else have any favorite epics?

And Dad/VN – I should look up the SI pieces you mention. Reading Mathiessen in Sports Illustrated would be a kick. I think the next step in the development of outdoor writing was Jann Wenner (of Rolling Stone) founding Outside magazine on the hunch that granola-ey types would appreciate a magazine that told them stories and occasionally suggested some useful gear.

The magazine fed the outdoor recreation industry, and pretty soon companies like Royal Robbins, Columbia, Vasque, Salomon, North Face, Black Diamond/Chouinard/Patagonia and MSR realized that there was a ton of money to be made by diversifying their product line. That’s how we get lines of shoes from flip flop to sandal to technical sandal to river shoe to approach shoe to cross-trainer to trail runner to day-hiker shoe to 3-day boots to steel-shank boots to crampon-ready mountaineering boots. (There are also specialized socks to go with each of these types of shoes.)

The gear explosion pushed back against the magazine industry, now that there was so much stuff to advertise. Articles got shorter to cover it all. At the same time, the writing had to pretend that we were all gnarly enough to really need the technological pinnacle of each gear type – sort of like New Yorkers who put a 36,000 BTU brushed-steel stove in their apartment kitchen.

The sad part, I think, is that there are plenty of good writers out there. There’s just no longer the same venue for their writing. Magazines stay afloat by selling ads to SUV, diamond-watch and spiced rum companies. They have to target people who make enough money to want those things. Moleskin and peanut butter just don’t bring in the ad dollars.

I think it could change back, but it would take a stable of writers like Cahill and Quammen – and an editor who believed there were people out there who missed those stories.

I was about to comment how the new Outside came today and the cover was seemingly a repeat dozens of past issues (The best 30 towns to live in America), but then I started paging through and found a brief article on the removal of dams across the country. Not something I had heard about before. There’s still some worthwhile articles, but more and more it’s the sidebars and the one page briefs that have interesting meat. Too often the main stories are formulaic and bland. Which is why I’m going to buy all the gear they’re advertising and go try to nearly kill myself.

Just fantastic! you captured and gave voice to the irritation i felt just a couple weeks ago when i rec’d my latest pile of nature and outdoors magazines, paged through them, and realized there was nothing in ANY of them that i actually WANTED to read…

once upon a time, i couldn’t get enough of the stories and biographies of great explorers and naturalists.

now i donate them all to the library almost as soon as they arrive, and wish others luck.
if i were interested in ‘Survivor’, i’d be looking at my tv, not my magazines.

Anyway, your articles are a treat to read! can’t wait to see what comes next! (maybe i’ll give up my subscriptions and just read YOUR stuff!)
~Z

btw- i feel i should point out that there is ONE mag that i still get that is REALLY worth the read- NebraskaLand magazine still has great articles that are INTERESTING and full of details..

…most likely because they don’t seem to have any major advertisers other than Cabella’s!

i wonder… a bit off topic, but i realized a couple years ago that Mother Earth News was losing its interesting articles and starting to go ‘fluff’… it happened that it was at the same time they picked up some major advertisers that started doing full page ads and layouts… is that the connection? ads=money=musthavemassappeal?

you’re right, c.a.h. (whoever you are) – it’s not all hopeless writing. Case in point: Jack Handey’s “Prepare a Wild-Caught Rabbit for a Meal” in their “How to Do Everything” roundup. Some bloggers rather less scrupulous than the Scribbler have typed the whole thing in. I’m not going to tell you who they are, but let’s just say you can find it pretty easily with a google search.

Zaxy, thanks for pointing us to NebraskaLand. I’ll check it out sometime. Nebraska has been an overlooked state in my life’s travel plans. Though I did once have a glorious drive along the Platte. Thousands of sandhill cranes flying over the road and a burning sunset in my rearview mirror.

Great post; thanks for your perspective. As a writer, it’s good to know that there are outdoor enthusiasts at large that want good, substantial, well-researched outdoors writing still instead of the increasingly gimmicky stunts that are commanding attention of late.

About the Scribbler

Hugh Powell is a little weary of big-ticket items like Pluto, the Mars rover, and small fossilized humans getting all the science news coverage. Keep an eye out here for wisps and scraps you won't find anywhere else. Particularly about the ocean, which is really cool and, honestly speaking, much bigger than you think.